Del Toro Says "Pacific Rim 2" Is Very Different

With the "Pacific Rim" sequel now officially set for an April 7th 2017 release, filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro has been talking about the giant robots vs. giant monsters follow-up whilst out doing promotion for his new TV series "The Strain".

Speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Del Toro revealed a couple of new details about the sequel which will apparently be able to stand on its own and will be quite different in feel from the first film:

"We are three years away, so to spoil anything would be fantastically silly of me. What I can tell you: [screenwriter Zak Penn] and I really went in, we started with [screenwriter Travis Beacham] about a year and a half ago, kicking ideas back and forth.

And, admittedly, I said to Zak, let's keep kicking ideas till we find one that really, really turns the first movie on its ear, so to speak. It was hard to create a world that did not come from a comic book, that had its own mythology, so we had to sacrifice many aspects to be able to cram everything in the first movie. Namely, for example 'the Drift' which was an interesting concept. [Then there was] this portal that ripped a hole into the fabric of our universe, what were the tools they were using?

And we came up with a really, really interesting idea. I don't want to spoil it, but I think at the end of the second movie, people will find out that the two movies stand on their own. They're very different from each other, although hopefully bringing the same joyful giant spectacle. But the tenor of the two movies will be quite different."

Del Toro also reveals that he begins design work on the film in six weeks with around nine months of that particular job ahead of him. There will be a few new jaegers and a lot of new kaiju. There's also new faces joining the cast with the plan to be as multicultural as possible. Men and women of all kinds of different nationalities will not only feature but will score equal amounts of story time.

The upcoming animated series will be set prior to the first film and will tell the stories that happened to pilots working in the Shatterdome. Some of the new characters will appear in the upcoming film sequel, and he hopes to have had at least one season of the show to have been on the air before "Pacific Rim 2" opens.